I’ve been trying to think what people get from religion and where else they might get it that wouldn’t lead to quite so many wars.

As for what people get from religion, that’s ridiculously simple and ridiculously complex at the same time: Stability. As infants, children, adolescents, and adults, we want stability, a world where yesterday, today, and tomorrow are pretty much the same so we can get on with doing whatever it is we want to do.

Secular institutions—governments, schools, companies—offer considerable stability which we treasure so much that we’re loath to change them—or ourselves—no matter how corrupt or misguided or irrelevant they become.

Such institutions offer nothing for the big questions, especially the D-question. Death mocks, or at least appears to mock, all secular stability. Enter religion. Actually: religions, because we clever humans have come up with all manner of ways to if not exactly deal with then at least get around the reality of death.

The organizers and administrators of religions look at the numbers—a billion Christians, a billion Muslims, etc.—and have to think: Yes, this way of finding Big Stability works. Illusory maybe, but the illusion is powerfully seductive and convincing.

Walk into any religious service and you’re hard put not to agree: Yes, this works. The consolation of religion works, creating places of serenity and even on occasion piety.

A character in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Crome Yellow, says:

    "All philosophies and all religions--what are they but spiritual [subways]
    bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is
    recognizably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to
    forget that all round and below and above them stretches the blind mass
    of earth, endless and unexplored."

In moments of piety in places of piety it’s too easy to forget the flipside of religions, the suffering they engender and inflict because each religion insists on its unique rightness and its—divine!—right to impose its order on everyone else. Remove religious wars from history and—surprise!—there’s very little bloodshed left.

In the panoply of human cleverness, have we come up with anything, anything that offers anything like the stability of religion? Anything at all that might replace it and thus replace its love of bloody, forced conversion of others?

We keep trying various political, social, and economic ideologies from fascism to communism only to find they too exact a dreadful toll and finally come up way, way short.

At the moment, many of us find hope, consolation, and even a certain stability in the massive grid of belief called science that we have constructed and placed over the observable universe. The price (pollution, global warming, etc.) that we’re going to pay for that particular set of blinders is only now becoming apparent.

What’s left? Art, as we’ve learned, appeals only to the passionate few. Sport, while appealing to the passionate many, offers at best the most ephemeral of consolations. Scholarship tends the flame of knowledge and keeps it burning but the flame turns out to be smaller than anybody—especially scholars—thought.

Drugs? The opened doors of perception give ingress to many new rooms well worth the exploring, but beware: Here there be serious monsters.

Oh how we love bread and circuses! Strip culture of its décor as we’re done here and you’re left with a bare skeleton that ain’t going to attract many of the suffering, starving billions in search of solace and stability.

The show not only must go on, it will go on, no matter what you or I say or do. Oh, we can divert, entertain, soothe even, for just a bit. But the show goes on.

I can erect an elaborate, carefully thought-out, lovely construction—a church, a temple, a synagogue, a mosque, a museum, a research lab—in which many can dwell and labor with considerable profit and benefit. But that construct is no more grand, no more permanent than a leaf on the oak tree outside my window.

If I choose, for whatever reasons, to focus my attention and my life, on such a construct, history carefully studied proves repeatedly that the only wisdom I will gain is the wisdom of ashes: Everything human is vanity.

But if I choose, for whatever reasons, to focus my attention on the oak leaf, or its parent tree, or the grass and flowers growing beneath it, access to true wisdom—that wisdom which famously passeth all understanding—may come. With patience, will in fact come. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime, most likely when you’re least expecting it.

Perseverance furthers.